Ruth
Posted March 10th, 2010 by Robert McNallyCategories: Personal Story
Dear Robert,
I recently came across your website when searching for an old friend, and just thought I would like to send a note to you for use on your very important site if you think it would be helpful.
Thank you so much for going to the trouble to put together a site like this. I think it is a tribute to the journeys which so many of us began feeling very isolated and nervous of sharing our thoughts. Perhaps now we realise we were in fact going through the same process as others, and there is a kind of comfort that can come from that. I would like to think that in some ways what the people who have written for your site have in common – along with so many others who haven’t but I know from honest conversations would completely recognise the feelings and the process – is that we share a lot more than a childhood and background steeped in a belief system we now very much reject. We have all had to struggle for honesty, thinking for ourselves and all that in the face of questioning extremely powerful authorities in our lives. We have sometimes paid heavily for that process, but I think we all really value the ability to be ourselves and to think freely and to treasure that with our children.
It feels to me like a journey into the sunshine and open space – not with so many answers and certainties, and still with loss and sadness of course. There are also still aches and lingering consequences, but we are now writing our own stories. And there is a kind of personal achievement in that which I feel should be honoured, and perhaps most of all by us who understand it.
So that’s why I’d like to write my story in case it helps anyone else.
I’m now 44 and was born into the WCG in the UK, the eldest daughter of a local deacon who in time became a local elder. For me of course, all seemed ‘normal’ because a child assumes what they experience is life as it is. I had a loving family and just felt sorry for the rest of the world who didn’t have our priveledged knowledge. I was not as aware then of the costs being paid around me when life conflicted with belief or teaching.
As the years went on though I did touch on some things which jarred briefly. I remember a minister crying when he read out the corrected teaching on divorce and remarriage, presumably guilty at what his own teachings may have led to in people’s real lives. I saw a young man be forced to choose between his family/church when he fell in love with a young woman of another race. I got to know friends at school who were coming out as gay and sensed a gulf between real people and dogma which I did not understand how it could be bridged.
As a bright schoolgirl, I was offered a scholarship at an outstanding school. It was not pursued, in part I think because of our perspective on education and women and what the future held. I was particularly good at literature and drawn to novels, but bothered by an AC student who told me at SEP that theatre was not allowed in the auditorium because it would involve thinking like a sinful person! I knew that all novels and plays involved empathising and crossing into other lives and thoughts. I felt divided, as reading had been for so long my exit into other worlds and ideas. Instead I felt I had to face up to my natural tendency to fully join in with life and have boyfriends, etc, and so at 18 got baptised and went to AC. My local church and family were proud to see me embark on this adventure.
I arrived in a new country and new culture, desperate to do things right and to soak up teaching. But what I found was far from what was expected. In front of me was an ideal of how to be a success as a woman and as a believer based on some kind of 50’s American fundamentalism which was absolutely anathema to me personally. I tried and failed to suppress my own personality and my curiosity. In the end I came to the conclusion that any god who had created me was not in the business of destroying me, and so something must be wrong. I re-found books and took never-before read novels and poetry out of the library annexe and choked my rage at women’s clubs and lectures by middle aged American men on true femininity. The absurdity of it now makes me laugh in disbelief, at the outrageous foolishness and cultural bizarreness of it all.
As time passed though, I found more and more cracks I could not fill. I came across dear friends who I realised were gay and trying to hide it, at all costs, or fruitlessly to overcome it. I realised that sexual ‘frailty’ was prevalent at every level from the faculty to the students, and the impossible aims were oppressive to them as much as me. Because of my job and friends, I gained unusual insights into the lives of ‘evangelists’ and even the church’s leaders – the Armstrongs and Tkach’s senior and junior (Mr Armstrong died while I was a student and a poem I wrote about his death was published in the student newspaper – based on what I later learned was the myth of the end of his life rather than its truer, more moving story.) So I learned from those who lived and worked with our leadership at the very closest and most personal quarters of frustrated and repressed homosexuality, affairs, illegitimate children, abuse ignored by ministers, mental illness denied – even in the partners of church leaders, pornography hidden, and on and on. I began to see them as people, perhaps as much or even more victims in hindsight than we were, wrapped up in a mythology which was addictive and almost impossible to live healthily within.
Still I held on though to the innocence and integrity of my parents idealism, and the loyal faith of the people in my local church area. I hid from them what I’d seen, and tried to bridge this frail humanity with my own efforts.
I came back to the UK at the end of four years and, not at all by design, ended up working in the church offices. As a woman I regularly wrote letters and sermons for senior ministers and also articles, allowing this to be done by them or with a male name as clearly it could not be done by me. I also saw utter tragedies amongst those we knew – including the accidental death of the children of a dear friend – which made it less and less credible for me to hold onto the view of an intervening, healing god I’d been taught so idealistically as a child. The gap was harder and harder to ignore. I strained at the effort.
As the church began to assess itself, and split into ‘new’ and ‘old’ thinking, I had a new life. My lovely friend and husband was already ill at ease with the church and its certainties. And I was restudying literature at university and questioning how we know what we know and the stories we tell. At last in a simple act of letting go, I realised I no longer accepted the first principles I had been taught. I was not sure god existed. I did not accept the Bible as a ‘manual’ for life to be read simply and applied directly. And I did not see ‘the church’ as the sole guardian of revealed knowledge. In one week, I knew I had to resign my job and walk away. With as little fuss as possible, I did.
Of course, it is not as easy as that. Our families retained allegiance to one or other version of the church as ministers and defenders of those faiths, and found it hard to see us make our own way. Such different perspectives would make connections almost impossible, without the love which also allows us to understand and forgive to an extent. I do not look at them or my past as all wrong. I see it as misled, and a warning at how far ideals and a lack of ability to appeal against power can make vulnerable even the very best of people. I buried my beloved father with this thought still in my mind.
Since then, I have given birth to two wonderful sons. My gift to them is their freedom and my openness to who they are. They are treasured without any certainty of their future or requirement on them to be anything other than who they are. This is also love.
To all who are still angry, I think that is because you care about justice and you are right. Any of the churches which followed, including the reformed WCG, still seem to me in denial about the real issues but then I care less and less what they think other than the harm they may still do. I would hope that in time you can let go of some of the pain as you rewrite your own story. But then I know that I have suffered less than many.
I hope this story helps, and maybe it is time that it is ‘out there’ and on the record. We who have written on this site are not a ‘family’ any more. We are not special. But maybe we have learned something special, and it is up to us to treasure that freedom and to share it in our own turn.
Ruth